Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire features blues singers, filmmakers, haints, healers, romance, and magic from Georgia to Chicago!
At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This "dreaming in public" becomes common culture and part of what transforms immigrants and "native" born into Americans.
Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a "city of the future." They are gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlors, in wounded hearts. The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow.
Release date:
February 1, 2022
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
384
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Christmas moonbeams snuck through a break in the live oak trees, and Redwood Phipps planted her eleven-year-old self in the cold silvery light. Long legs and all, she was bone tired. Big brother George, her teary cousins, and wild-eyed grown-ups were leapfrogging through grandmother oaks, much wider than they were tall and so tangled up in one another, could have been a square mile of one tree. A maze of moss-covered boughs going every which way at once tripped up any fool aiming for speed. Redwood pressed her feet into the muck and felt fat ole roots holding down the ground. She leaned against gnarled branches holding back the sky. Warm as an ember in the small of her back, little sister Iris cooed in her sleep and burped sweet baby breath. Redwood turned her face to the stars, shivered, and closed her eyes.
The wind picked up. Sharp oak leaves sliced at her arms. She wanted to conjure herself somewhere else and give her poor legs a rest. But she’d just have to drop back into this mad dash to nowhere. And why try for some other where and when, without Mama to catch her if she got lost, without anybody to believe.
Redwood sank down on a mossy bough and rubbed an angry calf.
All they’d been doing for days was run: down dusty roads, through cold swamp mud, over the dead stocks of winter oats. Since a week ago, must be. Mama woke her up in the middle of a sweet singing and dancing dream. Then they raced out into a nightmare. Red flames flared against the black sky, babies screamed, and pale nightriders pumped shotguns at shadows darting through the trees. A posse of white men were going buck mad all over colored Peach Grove.
Whose fault was that?
Yellow fever took Daddy to Glory this past summer. Otherwise the family wouldn’t have been running at all. That’s what George said. Redwood tried not to be mad at Daddy for leaving or at Mama for letting him go. When it was really your time, even a powerful conjure woman like Mama couldn’t cheat the boneyard baron from his due.
First it was just them running—Mama with baby Iris on her back and big brother George holding Redwood’s hand. Then two days ago, after the sun sank into mustardy mist, Miz Subie lurched out of the swamp grass, gray hair rioting ’cross her head, whiskers on her jaw twitching. “Demon posse going wild, and I was high and dry, out of harm’s way. Why you calling me into this swamp between a hoot and a holler?”
Redwood snorted as Mama and Miz Subie hid behind the domed roots of a cypress tree to argue. Posse tracking them wouldn’t get nowhere but lost. Mama’s hoodoo spells kept them safe. She had secret places nobody could hardly find. Miz Subie had that cataract eye—wasn’t too good at seeing in daylight, get lost in her own front yard. She never wanted to bother with gators or snakes or mosquitoes. Mama must’ve left a hoodoo trail Miz Subie could follow with her eyes closed. Had to follow, probably. Didn’t she teach Mama conjuring? Why all the fussing and cussing?
“Garnett Phipps, you can run through fire and not get burnt,” Miz Subie raised her voice loud enough for Redwood and George to hear, “but that won’t put it out!”
“What you asking me to do?” Mama shouted too. “Stay here and what?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” Subie replied. Redwood had never heard her sound so shaky. “If you’re going, go. Otherwise—you running these little ones ragged.”
Mama didn’t say much after that. She hugged and kissed Iris and Redwood and fixed them in her eyes, but when it come to George, he pretended he was too grown for Mama still loving him like her baby. “I’m sixteen New Year’s Day, 1899. A man now, ain’t I?” he said. “Why we been running in circles? What you plan to do now?” Mama glared at George, but he kept on. “Why can’t you tell me what’s what?”
“Can’t nobody tell you what’s what.” All the mad drained out of Mama’s eyes. “You got to figure that for yourself.” Mama hugged him hard, and he didn’t want to let her go. She pulled away. “Y’all watch over each other. You hear me?” She squeezed Redwood’s hand till it hurt. “Keep a look out, Subie. For my children. Keep a look out.” Then Mama took off on her own, mud up to her thighs, tiddies dripping milk, tears aching in her eyes.
“We goin’ catch up with your mama later,” Subie said. “She got hard business to take care of.”
“I could help,” Redwood said. “If she’s doing a tricky spell.”
Subie didn’t answer right off. “No. We need you to stay with us.”
Redwood wanted to run after Mama but knew better than to make a big fuss. Didn’t she have to sing to keep baby Iris from howling? Indeed, Redwood sang till they found Aunt Elisa who let Iris suck ’cause—
“Auntie be trying to wean your cousin, so drink me dry, gal.”
Two days gone by since then, the whole raggedy family on the run—Uncle Ladd, Aunt Elisa, the five cousins too—sniffling, stumbling, and ain’t nobody seen another sign of Mama, not Uncle Ladd who could track anything walking nor Miz Subie on the lookout for a hoodoo trail. Mama’s hard business was taking too long.
Redwood peered through scraggly oak leaves curling against the chill. At least no more red fires danced ’cross the black face of night. Redwood tasted the air, drawing it slowly ’cross her tongue: cold ashes, cold soot. Maybe the nightmare was over. Maybe nobody needed to be running in circles no more, and she could lie down and catch a good sleep. Maybe Mama would come take them home …
“What you doing? We gotta keep ahead of those nightriders, till it’s safe to go back. Get up.” George pulled her off the old oak bough. His arms were thick with muscle. He shook Redwood once, twice, and rattled her teeth the third time. “Follow me. Should I take Iris?”
“No.” Iris wailed if she wasn’t sucking on Aunt Elisa or riding Redwood’s back. Half an hour ago, despite bumping and jiggling through the woods, she got Iris to sleep singing. Why mess up that? In the moonlight, George found a way through the crisscross of boughs, but Redwood lagged behind. Each step, her feet throbbed and her legs wobbled. Wet, heavy air choked aching lungs, like she was breathing everybody’s sweat. Her heart banged against her chest.
“Take your sister’s hand, George, and keep a lookout.” Aunt Elisa talked like Mama for a moment.
Redwood could’ve bust out crying. Nobody was really like Mama. George reached out grubby fingers and pulled her along. His heart wasn’t in it. Redwood stopped again. She wasn’t running like them hound dogs who kept going even after their hearts stopped, even after they were dead.
“You feel something, sugar, the rest of us don’t?” Miz Subie placed a cool palm on Redwood’s hot brow and drew the fever, drew the weary right to her fingers. “A sign all right.” Her milky eye twitched. “You think you can help us find your mama now?”
The whole family stood ’round Redwood, gawking.
“You know how to track her,” George said.
“Can’t find Mama if she don’t want to be found.” Redwood wondered what trick they were playing on her. Grown-ups were always hoarding the truth and lying, even though they said that was sin. “She’ll find us, when she want to. I’m too tired.”
“Why you got to be so stubborn? Have your way every time?” George just wanted her to do what he wanted.
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